Monday, January 23, 2012

Living Life

I'm going to have to start updating this more often to keep all my relatives from overtaking my facebook (Mom).

Anyways the semester if now in full swing! Classes are all going, trips are planned for almost every weekend, sports teams are starting up and this week I will be meeting the family that will be adopting me for the semester in our Adopt-A-Family program.

This past week I joined the volleyball and basketball teams here. The volleyball team is awful as of right now because every girl in the world thinks she can play volleyball...doesn't help that we have a cute British guy coaching us. So far the coach knows my name along with my friend from Eau Claire (Kristin). We are such super stars that he asked us to be team captains. He told us that means we need to yell at people and take charge of the team. My goal is just to hit people in the face to get rid of them. So far they don't like my new and improved jump serve. The most exciting thing we have done so far in practice is hitting lines where we have a sweatshirt laying down line on the court and if we hit it the coach owes us a drink. I don't think anyone hit it the first day but I was 6 inches away so I'm sure he'll owe me a few drinks by the end of the semester. (A certain someone back home always told me I couldn't hit line but I have to prove him wrong now.) We haven't had any games yet but we know that we will play anyone from D1 mens teams, to prisoners (yes I will be going to a prison to play volleyball...wonder if I can put that on my criminal justice resume), to intro levels teams. Should be interesting. Coach even said I'll probably be setting so that should be even more interesting!

Now onto basketball. Our school doesn't have an official coach so whoever showed interest got the job. Needless to say we have some dumb guy trying to coach us. It's not working out to well for him. We will set up productive drills and actually start playing then he will take us down to the base line and throw a ball down the court which we have to chase and then dive after. Needless to say my bladder kicked in during the drill so I hung out in the bathroom. We have about 11-12 people on our team and 4 of us our girls. To our coach that basically means we have 7-8 people on the team because obviously the male species is much superior and women can't play sports. We had our first game yesterday and he would put one of us girls in for a minute or two then put another one of us in for that girl then all the boys would go back in for another quarter. Oh well we make sure he hears our opinions on the bench and will likely be overthrown this week! Our game was still quite entertaining. Right now we are playing for the handicap cup. This means we start with a certain amount of points, not that we are playing people in wheel chairs! Yesterday we played a team with all men from Latvia or somewhere else that didn't speak english. We were able to kind of keep up with them even though they were all a foot taller than us. I think the most exciting part of the game was that at halftime their whole team went outside for a "fag" break. We're thinking that's why we lost so we'll probably take up smoking.

That is pretty much the only exciting stuff I did this past week. We went out on the wild town of Grantham this past weekend. It appears as though everyone here thinks we're dumb for coming to this town. It's ok we make the most of it. FYI Emma I finally heard the term "wanker" used! We also tried to teach them what a "bro" was. They didn't quite get out culture. It is interesting getting to know what people think of us compared to what we think of them. To everyone else the US the most powerful nation in the world and no other country even compares to it. They didn't even care when we tried to explain how overweight the country is. Last weekend I was talking with a girl from Switzerland and we were talking about how I thought it was amazing how some people know 3-4 different languages over here and in her country. What I did not realize was that for them they need to know multiple languages to just be able to travel in their country. She said that every side of their country spoke a different language and she could not live in her country without knowing 4 different languages. It was just weird because in high school we would have foreign exchange students and we always just thought they were really smart for knowing multiple languages but in reality it was a necessity that they knew the multiple languages.

Well that's about all I have for now. We have another basketball game this week and then I have to start planning my trip to Scotland for this weekend!

Cheers!

PS I learned some knew volleyball terms! Apparently when two people go for a ball they are called "lovers" and when they both stop and no one gets the ball up they are called "a married couple" because there is no energy there :)